The descriptive term “invisible primary” has become a misnomer. For decades, it served as the conventional name for the long stretch of presidential campaigning that precedes party primaries and caucuses. But the period is not invisible, it does not turn on voting, and the rise of social media has accentuated both counter-phrase developments.
Social media platforms have joined politics niche channels and publications in exhibiting a great deal of what candidates do and say in the many months before Iowa and New Hampshire. During this time, their public activity consists more of branding and auditioning to the politically attentive than it does persuading and mobilizing targeted segments of the electorate. Social media have expanded the ranks of those paying attention beyond party activists, political professionals, and campaign journalists. And they have brought the comments and shares of this enlarged community into public view as well. Accordingly, communications during the so-called invisible primary are now better understood as the activity of a political marketplace, in which millions of consumers of political messages choose among vendors and ratify their choices by echoing their words, so that more people hear them.
A Medley of Debate Judges and Judgments
On August 6, 2015, the Republican National Committee (RNC), in collaboration with media sponsors Fox News and Facebook, staged the opening debate among candidates for the party’s presidential nomination. As with the previous 73 GOP presidential debates dating back to 1948, there were no set criteria by which candidates could be ranked on their performances and a winner could be designated. (Of course, the same fuzzy condition applies to Democratic debates as well.) Instead, a variety of self-appointed judges, relying on a variety of standards and methods, ventured forth assessments. These judges included the candidates and their campaign staffers and surrogates, the sponsor-designated newspersons who moderated the event and posed questions to the candidates, audience research organizations conducting polls and focus groups, journalists and commentators, and anyone making use of opportunities to express opinions in mass and social media. I shall refer to them collectively as “expressive attentives,” to distinguish them from others watching and learning about the debate but not moved to comment in public.
The most authoritative winner–loser judgments were anchored in poll results, in that those provided a veneer of objectivity. Indeed, the debate organizers relied on poll standings to establish the roster of candidates eligible to participate. But the persons polled (and, more subtly, those writing the poll questions) nevertheless lacked firm and discrete judging criteria. Convenient heuristics to assist with their choices were scarce. Party identification figures heavily in picking winners in general election debates, but this was a competition within one party. It was also the very first debate, with no previous performances to help with the gauging. The mind-concentrating circumstances of intense localized campaigning and a pending vote choice were at least 6 months and six more scheduled debates away, and then available only to party activists residing in Iowa. To top it off, there were 16 candidates participating, in two groups. The double session supplied an ingoing suggestion, to be sure, along with the predebate judgments in media circulation and the podium assignments based on the poll standings. Still, this was no game, sport, award show, or election. The debate winners and losers were anyone and everyone’s guess.
The first GOP debate of the 2016 presidential campaign is thus an exemplar of Lloyd Bitzer’s concept of a “rhetorical situation,” wherein “exigent” ambiguities press on a collection of people such that they become more susceptible to persuasion by someone who can provide a fitting and clarifying account, a lens through which they can see what’s going on and act to their satisfaction (Bitzer 1992). The exigencies—“an imperfection marked by urgency,” in Bitzer’s formulation—lay not just in who would get a boost in the Republican race to be the next president, or nominee, or front-runner but also in what issues and what sort of character traits would be of prime importance as the race continued.
Hindsight helps us see the most significant outcome of the August 5, 2015 debate and raises a question in connection with a contrast evident among the judgments at the time. The eventual winner, Donald J. Trump, dramatically transgressed five norms of candidate debate behavior:
• He refused to pledge support to the eventual party nominee.
• He insulted women, notably moderator Megyn Kelly, the only woman on the stage, and actress/talk show host/activist Rosie O’Donnell. This provocation escalated during a televised interview the following night, when Trump alluded to Kelly’s menstrual cycle as a source of her allegedly hostile attitude toward him.
• He stereotyped and exaggerated the threats to Americans posed by undocumented immigrants and blamed the government of the major nation of entry, Mexico.
• He proudly admitted to having curried favor through campaign contributions with government officials, liberals/Democrats as well as conservatives/Republicans, including those presidential candidates on stage with him and, most notably, the likely Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton.
• He proudly admitted he manipulated investors while making money for himself when taking a few of his companies through the bankruptcy laws.
Even as he stirred emotions with these statements, Trump offered rationales for each of them:
• Not pledging support to the eventual nominee provided him with bargaining leverage against the other candidates, most of whom were part of corrupt and inept Washington, D.C.
• The insults were just kidding around; more important, he and the country did not have time for “total political correctness.”
• He brought the problem of rapists and criminals coming through the Mexican border to everyone’s attention; he had evidence to document the problem and a way to stop it (the wall); the media distorted what he said about Mexicans.
• He could not be bought, and he had used that weakness in politicians to get what he needed from them, including Hillary and Bill Clinton, who attended his wedding to Melania Knauss.
• He used the bankruptcy laws as other great businessmen have, to reduce costs and make money, and the loser investors were not really victims.
These aggressive statements, presented through a roguish persona, were emblematic of Trump’s insurgent self-marketing campaign. They were show-stopping moments.
In making their instant judgments, political insiders rejected the arguments and downgraded the speaker. Ballotpedia conducted a snap online poll of “106 Republican operatives, strategists and party activists from around the country.” (Barnes 2015) As can be seen in Table 1, they awarded “biggest winner” victory plurality to Marco Rubio (29%), followed by John Kasich (19%) Jeb Bush (18%), and Chris Christie (17%); Trump got 1% and Ted Cruz 2%. Meanwhile, 49% deemed Trump the “biggest loser,” with Rand Paul next at 24%. (A parallel survey of 44 Democrats yielded similar results regarding the winners, favoring Christie, Kasich, and Rubio. But regarding the losers, they selected Bush (32%) and Paul (30%), with Trump tied with Walker for third biggest loser at 14%.)
Rubio impressed the Republican insiders with his forceful and aspirational statements. Kasich “sounded confident and reasonable.” As for Trump, James A. Barnes summarized the comments thusly:
“Too much anger, too many non sequiturs,” said one GOP insider. “Peevish, scowling, thin skinned, shallow,” said another. “Bombastic, offensive, and arrogant,” echoed a third. Several of the GOP professionals were put off by Trump’s declaration at the start of the debate that he could not rule out an independent run for the presidency if he did not win the party’s nomination. “He alienated people on the very first question,” said a party operative. “He showed this is all about him. He is more concerned about himself than our party or beating Clinton.” Another GOP insider predicted, “He would lose a general election by 50 points.”
The insider assessments differed from the preferences evident in polls and the distribution of express attention on Twitter. By those metrics, Trump continued to dwarf the Republican field. Bush, an early favorite, and Rubio, the insider-anointed debate winner, scarcely registered on Twitter. Carly Fiorina, excluded from both the prime time panel and the insider survey, benefited from a boomlet of attention on Twitter, as did Ben Carson. However, neither candidates’ rise came at Trump’s expense.
TABLE 1 Debate Winners and Losers by Three Metrics
For a presidential candidate to crash into a party’s eminences, violate its norms, contest its consensus on issues and not pay a swift penalty in public standing runs afoul of some theoretical principles and historical patterns found in the study of presidential campaign communications and campaign debates in particular.
